Khinjaria (meaning "dagger") is an extinct genus of plioplatecarpine mosasaurid from the Late Cretaceous Ouled Abdoun Basin of Morocco. The genus contains a single species, K. acuta, known from a partial skull and vertebra. Khinjaria was likely an apex predator in its environment, as its large body size, blade-like teeth, and unusual skull morphology would have allowed it to attack large prey animals.
Khinjaria (meaning "dagger") is an extinct genus of plioplatecarpine mosasaurid from the Late Cretaceous Ouled Abdoun Basin of Morocco. The genus contains a single species, K. acuta, known from a partial skull and vertebra. Khinjaria was likely an apex predator in its environment, as its large body size, blade-like teeth, and unusual skull morphology would have allowed it to attack large prey animals.
== Discovery and naming == The Khinjaria holotype specimen, MHNM.KHG.521, was discovered in sediments of the Oulad Abdoun Basin (Lower Couche III, Sidi Chennane locality) in Khouribga Province, Morocco. The specimen consists of a partial skull (with a partial premaxilla, both maxillae, the prefrontals, the frontal and parietal, right postorbitofrontal, partial right squamosal, and a dentary) and an associated vertebra, possibly coming from the trunk region.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).